Tim Peters wrote in message <000501bf897a$f7a71180$0d2d153f at tim>...
>[Kragen Sitaker]
>> ...
>> Well, the lines are things like this:
>>>> 2911.02,"ROBBERY - FORCE, THR",foo,bar,baz
>>>> And I want something like ['2911.02', 'ROBBERY - FORCE, THR', 'foo',
>> 'bar', 'baz'] as a result. Note that the comma in the robbery field
>> doesn't split the field.
>>The problem with these kinds of formats is that nobody defines them
>carefully enough to know what to do.
He could be dealing with an existing format. Many spreadsheets can be
persuaded to export their data in a format independent way only with comma
separated flat ascii files, for example.